Designing Cloud Based Agricultural Framework For Ethiopia

Abstract

Food security in the developing world, especially in Ethiopia, need to be more information concentrated than resource concentrate. This is achievable by considering and incorporating factors such as policy, legal framework, technology, knowledge, markets, research among others, in addressing food security. Millions of farm families and the rural poor require exact information and facts for their agricultural survival. Arguably, famine and poverty are concentrated in developing countries due to poor capacity to develop, to access and to manage agricultural information and facts about agricultural production. To address this, there is a need to integrate information required by the farmers and all stakeholders in agriculture into a single access point to access anywhere-anytime and by any device information. To solve the existing problem in Agricultural sector we have proposed to design a cloudbased framework that integrate the agricultural services and minimize the technological costs, through interview and literature review on cloud computing as the research methodology The study used 14 experts' as participants from the ministry of agriculture whose were selected through sampling techniques. The result obtained from the interview shows that no single systems in Ethiopia agriculture that can afford enough access channel to serve the farming community. The proposed framework is based on a hybrid cloud deployment model because of its suitability for an organization which wants to gain the benefits of both securities as well as cost-effectiveness. The framework also uses PaaS (Platform as a Service) as a service delivery model in the way that the user has full control over application and data. The integration of agricultural services will be based on SOA concepts with web services via cloud computing. The single access point will allow the stakeholders to interact and increase the benefit of shared and accessible information. By putting the farmer at the center of attention, the framework enables the farmers to get access to all services they required such as crop cultivation services, weather-related services, and agricultural extension services. Finally, the prototype of the designed framework has been developed using ASP.net to show the validity of the framework.